Skip to content

Politics

Columns

It Takes a Spillage
September 13, 2016
The scale of the revelations in the Panama Papers leaked this spring can lead to a feeling of helplessness. There are 11.5 million documents concerning 214,000 shell companies, which implicate hundreds of international politicians and officials including presidents, prime ...

Our New War Machines
September 12, 2016
For an institution synonymous with tradition and continuity, the American military is in quite a radical state of flux. In just the six or so years since I left the Army, two major demographic shifts that might superficially appear unrelated (or even contradictory) have taken ...

Lo How a Trump E’er (Stinkily) Blooming
August 01, 2016
I first caught wind of the blooming of the New York Botanical Garden’s corpse flower—a titan arum, more properly termed—during the Republican National Convention, when caretakers first announced that their ten years of careful labor, watering and fertilizing a ...

The Baffler’s Officially Unofficial DNC Reading List
July 25, 2016
Thirteen months ago, U.S. senator and self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders kicked off his campaign on the shore of Lake Champlain in his home state of Vermont. Sanders wasn’t expected to win—nor was he expected to get this far. And while he may have ...

Punk Rock and Protest
July 07, 2016
Growing up, I learned the word solidarity from a vocabulary flash card. It was not something I had ever felt until my shoe became untied in the mosh pit at a NOFX concert in the early 2000s. When I knelt to re-tie it, four strangers formed a wall around my crouching body to ...

It Depends on the Meaning Of “Quo”
June 29, 2016
On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously decided to vacate the conviction of disgraced former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell. The Commonwealth’s GOP chief was convicted in Sept. 2014, along with his wife, Maureen, on federal corruption and bribery charges. The pair had ...

Neither Great Nor British
June 24, 2016
I went to bed smugly satisfied last night after UK Independence Party leader and charmless performative drunk Nigel Farage conceded defeat. It seemed Britain had hung together and voted to Remain in the European Union after all. I woke up to a different reality. The Leave ...

Anthem for Bummed Youth
June 08, 2016
As the Democratic primary campaign comes to a close, let us recall how strange and improbable it has been all along. Hillary Clinton started out as her party’s hand-picked standard-bearer, the baddest and brightest of the nation’s dominant political faction. No ...

The Anti-Imperial Emperor
May 25, 2016
The U.S. presidential campaign has provided the “developing” world with a remarkable spectacle. Donald Trump’s antics have served as welcome evidence that political tragedy and disaster don’t only happen down here in less rich countries. But political idiocy coming from ...

Interview with Whistleblower Bill Binney
May 23, 2016
Bill Binney resigned from his job as technical director of the NSA in October 2001. The data-monitoring tool he had developed, ThinThread, had been shelved and, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush-Cheney administration chose dragnet monitoring instead. He spoke to Kade ...

Irish Exceptionalism: The Nationalist Left
May 09, 2016
Coming to Ireland from the United States, particularly the United States in 2016 under the looming shadow of Trumpism, the latest incarnation of a nasty right-wing populism that wraps itself in the flag and scapegoats immigrants for its troubles, it was hard to feel that a ...

The Spanish Democracy Revolutions
May 06, 2016
The Zapatistas of Chiapas have a phrase: “The fight for democracy is a slow burn.” It resonates at the Parliament of Catalonia, and all across the Spanish state, where indignation is rife. Research over there late last year gave me the opportunity to see four post-capitalist ...